Now, after "rounding" the southwest corner where one finds Channel-Port-aux Basque, one heads northwest to a peninsula known as Port au Port Peninsula.

This relatively small peninsula juts out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Directly west (10 km or 6 mi) of Stephenville, the peninsula is roughly triangular in shape and connected to the "main" part of the island by a narrow isthmus at the town of Port au Port.

To the south is St. George's Bay and to the northwest by the Port au Port Bay. From east to west, it is approximately 40 km (25 mi) in width, and from south to north 50 km (31 mi) in length.

A major portion of the peninsula consists of a finger-like projection that goes from Lourdes to the very tip at Long Point, which by itself is approximately 25 km (15.5 mi) in length.

There are several possibilities about the derivation of the peninsula's name. According to information presented in the ENL, some writers believe that the name came from migratory French fisherman, and that it translates as "door to door", referring to the placement of "adjacent bays".

However, E. R. Seary is reported as suggesting that the name is derived from the Basque expression Ophor portu or Apphorportu. He suggested that the element portu means "harbour" and the ophor/apphor refers to either a "holiday" or as a "wooden bowl or vase".
If "holiday" is the correct interpretation, according to Wikipedia contributors, it has been suggested that the expression ophor portu translates to "port of rest".

It is believed that the peninsula was visited by Basque fishermen as far back as the early 1500s.

According to ENL sources, Jacques Cartier visited the Peninsula in 1534 and may have landed on the entrance to the peninsula where today one finds the community of Port au Port West.

Because of the "smallness" of the Peninsula, and the commonalities among all the various communities (i.e., in terms of when they were first settled, etc.) in this following section the various settlements will be described, going clockwise from the start of the isthmus travelling westward to Cape St. George, and "around the corner" north-easterly to Long Point, and returning to the starting point.

The peninsula is "divided" into three sections: The Southern Shore, which extends from Port au Port to Cape St. George (Rt. 460); The Northern Shore, from Cape St. George to Long Point (Rt. 463); and the Eastern Shore, from Long Point, back to Port au Port (Route 463 and local roads).

The entire route is often referred to as "The French Ancestors Route" or "La Route des Ancêtres Français", and it is a total of approximately 160 km (99.4 miles) long.

Much of the information presented here came from the Benoit's First Nation website (which will be referenced in the rest of this document as the BFN website) and credit should be given Jasen Sylvester Benwah for amassing all the information.

Much of his material comes from contributors to the ENL, however, it is supplemented by information handed down through the generations by this particular First Nations group.

In the 1950s, the three communities amalgamated, and Port au Port West officially became Port au Port West-Aguathuna- Felix Cove.

Its boundaries take in several communities, both on the shores of Port au Port Bay to the north (Aguathuna and Bellman's Cove) and on St. George's Bay to the south (Felix Cove and Man o' War Cove).

1. Port au Port West: According to information presented in the ENL, Jacques Cartier is believed to have visited the Peninsula in 1534 and to have landed at what is now the community of Port au Port West.

History shows that French fishermen began to frequent the area in large numbers by the late 1700s, "as the Peninsula had the advantage of access to the fishing grounds of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, St. George's Bay and Port au Port Bay".

A man named LaFitte from the island of St. Pierre may have been the first European settler, arriving in the 1790s. It is believed that many of the early settlers were actually deserters from the French fleets.

2. Aguathuna: According to the BFN website, what is now Aguathuna, was originally Bellman's Cove when the area was first settled. Later it became known as Jack of Clubs Cove.

Local legend is that one particular limestone pillar had been eroded by wave action of the sea and resembled a "club" from a deck of playing cards.

While it was known that there were limestone deposits in the area, the mine didn't start actual operation until 1911.

According to information presented in the ENL, the quarry's manager, Arthur House, wanted to rename the site as he felt that "that business correspondence emanating from a place called Jack of Clubs Cove [would] hardly be treated with... serious respect and confidence".

Archbishop M.F. Howley was the first to suggest the name 'Aguathuna', believing it to be the Beothuk word for 'white stone'.

On October 24, 1911, a petition was signed by 55 residents and the name was changed. Linguists now believe that the Beothuk word aguathoonet or aquathoont in fact referred to a "grindstone".

3. Felix Cove: It is believed that Felix Cove was named for an early settler, Harold Felix from France. A fisherman by trade, he taught his sons to fish and his sons taught their sons.

The only real farming that was undertaken in the area was just for home use and lumbering only was done on a limited scale.

Early settlers were the French, but they were joined by English and Scots; there was a lot of intermarrying, along with the Mi'kmaq resulting in a new generation of children who could speak virtually no French or Mikmawisimk (Mi'kmaw).

The demise of the French language is recounted in an article by Jeff Butt on the Heritage NF website, dated 1998: A considerable portion of the francophone population of Newfoundland's west coast, as we know it today, traces its origins back to a wave of Acadian settlers from Cape Breton Island beginning at the end of the 18th century (Thomas 1983 11).

These French-speaking Acadians settled in various pockets in and around the Stephenville-Bay St. George-Codroy Valley area, and developed an economy based mainly on farming and, to a lesser extent, on fishing.

Relative isolation and a family- based economy allowed them to retain, until recently, their French language and customs.

It must be remembered that during the 19th century, and indeed until 1904, France enjoyed fishing privileges along what was known as the French Treaty Shore.

Some French fishermen deserted their vessels and took up residence on the Port-au-Port Peninsula. These deserters, from Brittany for the most part with some also from Normandy, Saintonge and St. Pierre, settled mainly on the western extremities of the peninsula, thus constituting a second wave of French settlement (Thomas 1977 7).

There, they formed the communities of Black Duck Brook, Winterhouse, Mainland and Cape St. George (L'Anse-à-Canards, Maisons-d'Hiver, La Grand Terre and Cap-St-Georges).

It is believed that the first sailor to settle in Cape St. George was Guillaume Robin of La Roche-Derrien in Brittany who arrived in 1837, while it is commonly known that the last to settle there was Yves Lemoine in 1895 (Biays 15).

Unlike the Acadians further east, fishing was the mainstay for these Frenchmen, with subsistence farming acting as a supplement to their livelihood.

The two groups, bound by a common language, interacted regularly. Intermarriage between French fishermen and Acadian women was commonplace. The francophone population thus continued to expand, even though schooling and most church functions, when available, were carried out in English.

Hoping to guarantee a better future for their children, some French families turned their back on their heritage, and in so doing, on their language as well.

Still others were nudged into assimilation by members of the clergy. For this reason, surnames such as Young, White and Bennett are as easy to find on the west coast as are Lejeune, Leblanc and Benoit.
If names were not translated into English, they were given English pronunciations and spellings: O'Quinn for Aucoin (Thomas 1982 25), Lainey for Lainé and Barter for Bortheyre (Thomas 1986 25, 27).

One of the greatest impacts on the French-speaking population of Newfoundland's west coast was the establishment of the American air force base at Stephenville in 1941, which attracted many English-speaking people to the area and forced those French Newfoundlanders hungry for a secure income to speak English.

The advent of television in the 1960s, which of course was in English only, also contributed to the assimilation of French Newfoundlanders.

For the first time, English penetrated the home, where French had always been the dominant language. Assimilation has taken its toll to the point where today few people of French ancestry in the Bay St. George-Stephenville area are still able to speak the French tongue.

The western communities of the Port-au-Port peninsula were somewhat more resistant to the mass assimilation, due in large part to their isolation.

The decline of the French language continued with the depletion of fish stocks forcing many to move on to larger centres.

Despite these developments, a rebirth of interest in French culture and heritage arose in the 1960s. With the implementation of new federal government policies designed to protect linguistic minorities, the province's first francophone organization was set up at Cape St. George in 1971, under the name Les Terre-Neuviens Français.

Others followed: L'Héritage de l'île Rouge (at Mainland) and Chez les Français de l'Anse-à-Canards (at Black Duck Brook).

Nowadays, French-language television and radio are broadcast to francophones on the Port-au-Port peninsula, and students can receive a French-language education at the Centre scolaire et communautaire Sainte-Anne at Mainland.

Festivals such as Une Longue Veillée and Une Journée dans l'Passé annually celebrate the French heritage on the peninsula and share it with the other musicians and artists who come from various parts of the Francophonie, or French-speaking world.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to offset the impact of assimilation and to help the community expand, literacy courses aimed at teaching francophones on the peninsula to read and write in their own language are now available, while a French- language newspaper, titled Le Gaboteur, has been in print since 1984.

On a larger scale, French schools have opened their doors to students in the St. John's and Labrador regions, and in 1997 francophones in the province were granted their own school board.

It is clear that the French culture and language on the west coast of Newfoundland have indeed come a long way since the early 1960s, when a former professor with Memorial University of Newfoundland's Department of Modern Languages noted, after visiting the French-speaking communities on the Port-au- Port Peninsula, that there remained little trace of French culture worthy of mention and that it was indeed too late to reverse the impact of assimilation (Stoker 358).

However, despite the measures that have already been adopted to preserve this French heritage and dialect, both unique to Newfoundland, it is obvious that assimilation remains a factor that will continue to challenge the protective efforts of French Newfoundlanders on the Port-au-Port peninsula.

Used with permission from "Uncovering the Origin of 1001 Unique Place Names in Newfoundland and Labrador" 2021 Jennifer Leigh Hill

Address of this page: http://nl.ruralroutes.com/PortauPortWest